At last, something that I am already familiar with - ebooks and audiobooks. I have spent many hours looking into this - particularly free ones - to use at school. I also have Kindle for PC on my computer and this has allowed me to buy, download and trial many books - particularly beading pattern books and books for professional reading. I admit, I haven't fully gotten into personal reading of ebooks - mainly because I am trying to save money and not buy them and borrow them from the public library. I love the fact that you get ebooks/magazines so quickly. I also enjoy not having to find places to store them, the fact they're not going to get tatty etc. Also, of course, they are generally cheaper - a definite bonus!! I am about to get a tablet and so I think I'm going to enjoy them even more. I thought I would find reading off a screen annoying, but didn't find it a problem at all.
I have also puchased digital versions of many non-fiction books this year for school. How could you not in terms of access - we have interactive whiteboards around the school as well as laptop and desktop computers - I have copied them (yes I legally can) onto the server and so now everyone has access all the time, rather than the one person who has the physical book. I also love the extra ways you can use the pdfs to model and demonstrate etc in terms with adding sticky notes, underlining, etc. An excellent teaching tool and much easier than how I have tried to do this before.
I also create pdf books to use in my teaching - eg. scanned parts of a book and found information from lots of sources on the topic and other links to sites and information resources so that they are all in the same place. I do this to increase access. I usually create these in a Word, Publisher, PowerPoint - depending what it is - before saving as a PDF. These sit as resources for other teachers/students as well. I now need to work on creating the link from the library cataloguing system but that is my job next week.
I have looked at subscribing to a range of sites but have found that some of them work too slowly on our current computer network - the cabling or something - this is something that I think the school will be looking at next year.
As for Audiobooks, I personally subscribe to Audible and so am able to get books from there. One difficulty I have had is getting these to work on some of the school MP3 players. I think I need to convert to a different format. I haven't got around to doing this yet as I have worked around the problem. I originally started to get them to assist some students in the higher grades with lower reading abilities in accessing some of the books they wanted to read. I also like listening to the stories myself. I've also got some through ITunes.
I really like this side of the new technologies. I'm going to have a play with the digital storytelling now - good practice as I am planning to use this with a class this term.
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